It didn't come from anyone.
It came from a man who had already tried to buy the property, already tried to undermine the product, already tried to squeeze the only retail outlet willing to show it.
A man who, having failed at each of those approaches, had now decided to use the machinery of local government to accomplish what persuasion, pressure, and commercial sabotage had not.
Colleen read the letter twice, set it on the kitchen table, and sat down across from it the way she'd sat across from Norah's financial folder a year earlier.
Looking at a document that contained a verdict she hadn't asked for.
The inspection would cost time.
Not a lot of time, but time she didn't have because every hour spent gathering permits, filing responses, and documenting compliance was an hour not spent in the shop.
It would cost money.
Not a lot of money, but money she couldn't spare because the commission income was still thin, still barely enough to keep the lights on while she waited for boards to dry, for clients to find her, for the slow mathematics of reputation to compound into something that looked like stability.
More than that, it would cost attention.
The particular kind of attention she needed for wood that demanded her full presence every time she picked up a tool.
Figured walnut doesn't forgive distraction.
A hand plane pulled at the wrong angle tears the grain. A joint measured a thirty-second of an inch too wide opens a gap that no amount of clamping can close.
The work required a mind that was entirely in the shop, not partly in the shop and partly at the county office, partly calculating how many days she could afford to spend fighting a complaint that existed for no reason except one man's refusal to let a woman succeed at something he'd called scrap.
That evening, for the first time in the entire arc of this strange year, Colleen said something she'd never said before.
She was sitting at the kitchen table with the county letter in front of her. Norah was in the chair across from her, reading the complaint with the careful focus of a woman who understands bureaucratic language the way she understands financial statements, fluently, without needing to translate.
"Maybe he's right."
Colleen's voice was flat. Not defeated exactly, emptied.
Like a vessel that had been carrying something heavy for so long that setting it down felt less like relief than like losing the only weight that proved she was still standing.
"Maybe I should have taken his offer when he made it, sold the shop, let him have the lot, moved on."
Norah set the letter down.
She looked at her sister across that table, that old white-oak table Emmett had built.
The same table where she'd once laid out the numbers that proved buying storm timber was a mistake. The same table where Colleen had asked for time she couldn't afford.
Norah had been the voice of caution for a year. The voice of arithmetic.